Space Human Engineering

Human engineering principles of design for in-space maintenance.

The Application of Resilience Engineering to Human Space Flight

There is a concern that mishap reporting systems track information about previous anomalies but do little to protect against future failures. In contrast, the term ‘resilience engineering’ has been coined to describe techniques that identify the thousands of everyday positive actions that prevent accidents from occurring. This change of perspective poses significant theoretical and pragmatic ch...

Space-time Engineering

A fascinating possibility opened-up by general relativity is that of deforming space by creating wormholes connecting distant points, or bridges which connect distinct universes. If the points in question are distant in space, a wormhole provides a shorter path between them. If the points are distant both in space and time, a wormhole provides half of a potential time machine. However, Einstein...

Engineering Resilient Space Systems

Tissue engineering in space.

The purpose of this paper is to present the status of that part of the [Microgravity Application Program] project related to the study of cartilage formation from pig chondrocytes. The work carried out so far followed two lines: (i) chondrocytes were incubated for up to three weeks in the RPM; (ii) a module developed for in-vitro cartilage formation will be tested in a sounding rocket flight (M...